A History of Dreams, or, The Experimental Cinema of Georges Perec

A 6k word chapter contribution to The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema, Kim Knowles (ed.), Jonathan Walley (ed.) Palgrave Macmillan Sept 2024.

In 1974 an English-language version of Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec’s film, Un Homme qui dort, was released to American and UK audiences. Rather than “A Man Asleep” the film’s English title was set as, A Man in A Dream. This seemingly small slip in translation is the starting point for an exploration of dream in the experimental film works that Perec collaborated on in the 1970s. The article adopts a non-conventional approach to film analysis in order to explore the gaps between memory, history and fiction with a particular emphasis on what Perec calls, fictive memory. The article takes Perec’s work not simply as a subject of study but as an expanded form, as a set of collaborative and generative operations within which analysis and critical enquiry can take place. In doing so, it offers a discussion of dream history and interpretation in relation to cinema’s accelerated technologies of dream, where the production of culture and experience in waking life overlaps with that other, indefinable, unclassifiable, space of dream and dreamers.